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Fluoride in Drinking Water
Trump and America had a great week. The honeymoon is over. I hoped, prayed, and voted, for Trump to win this
election. Now that we won, it’s time to be critical of the person we hired to lead this great country. Let’s not fill the swamp just to drain it.
I’m referring to RFK Jr’s promised position in the Trump administration. It seems he made a deal for an endorsement in exchange for leading the DHHS, or the FDA. His big push is to remove fluoride from municipal water supplies.
When I first heard the story of Kennedy wanting to remove fluoride from drinking water, I just rolled my eyes. Now that it has hit many news outlets, I feel I need to write something about this non-issue.
I am trying to grasp his perspective. I can only think of two possible angles. 1) He doesn’t know it’s a problem that doesn’t exist. Or, 2) He knows it’s not an issue but is good for political points.
In my business I have been in 100-200 water treatment plants in the Northeast. Sometimes I will program and set up chemical feed systems, dumping tons of chemicals into millions of people’s drinking water. I lost count of all the places I have been in, but I know exactly how many have the equipment to feed fluoride. There are exactly two. One is on the north shore of Boston. The other is a ski town north of MA. They don’t use it, and the fluoride tanks are empty.
Obviously putting chemicals in drinking water is highly regulated by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). These people who run treatment plants are just regular people. They wouldn’t put a chemical into drinking water without documentation or a good reason. They would lose their license faster than Kamala losing track of her thoughts. (Limited time on Kamala digs).
I would have guessed people would be worried about Potassium Permanganate. KMNo4. It’s a big scary long word that turns your drinking water purple. It clumps the manganese and iron so it can be filtered out before you drink it. Nobody cares about that.
Anyone can get the DEP reports from their town’s website. The numbers can’t be fudged without huge fines. From my experience, it doesn’t happen. The fluoride issue isn’t an issue from my experience.
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STOP THE PRESSES. I needed to google the statistics so I wouldn’t have it thrown back in my face, which you all are so able to do. It seems according to the CDC nearly everybody is being fed fluoride. My experience says something completely different. Is it that only the northeast has naturally occurring fluoride? The data doesn’t specify where the natural fluoride is. I have never seen it being done in over 100 treatment facilities. This seems strange to me. CDC LINK. Am I not supposed to believe what my eyes are telling me?
2022 National Water Fluoridation Statistics
These statistics were prepared using water system data reported by states to the CDC Water Fluoridation Reporting System as of December 31, 2022, by the U.S. Census Bureau state population estimates as of July 1, 2020, and by population estimates served by public water supply as of 2015, as published by the U.S. Geological Survey June 19, 2018.
Values were aggregated or calculated at county and state levels. National-level values are a summation (or appropriate calculation based on a summation) of state-level values.
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I am not qualified to say this is good or bad. Just don’t literally want it forced down our throats.
In any case, I think we will get by just fine without another Kennedy.
Published in General
I saw a reference to that in the link that GPentelie posted, but I am skeptical. How could anyone conduct a reasonable study showing IQ loss due to fluoridated water? There are billions of other factors to account for that influence IQ and you would have to be able to either separate them out or test people who are leading identical parallel lives except for the water. Even then, IQ tests would have to yield pretty starkly contrasting results in order to be significant in an area where there is considerable leeway in measurement.
There are all sorts of questionable studies that claim to show damage to humans from various sources. For instance, studies that show huge numbers of people dying from second-hand smoke or from lead poisoning. I even found something from the Centers for Disease Control that claimed 20% of all deaths in the U.S. were caused by cigarette smoking or second-hand smoke. This is quite astonishing considering that only about 11% of U.S. adults smoke.
https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/tobacco_related_mortality/index.htm
Continuing on with my curiosity about the way the stuff works now instead of arguing over the political point; why?
What does the ideal glass of municipal water look like (fluoridated or not) and what kind of stuff gets added in?
This fits with what my dentist told me. He said that when the country inducted thousands of young men for World War II at roughly the same moment and subjected them all to complete physicals, the doctors found that the kids from New England had lousy teeth. Their subsequent research identified fluoride as the mineral that was missing in many parts of New England that was protecting kids’ teeth in other parts of the country. (The mineral makeup of New England varies a lot because of the sedimentary period events and later glacial events. Those geological events pushed rocks and boulders from Canada and scattered them randomly around New England. Thus the mineral content of New England water varies from town to town.)
I like fluoride. We didn’t put it in our town’s water supply so it was prescribed in prenatal vitamins so it would be built into the babies’ teeth as those teeth were first forming. Then the pediatric dentists prescribed low-dose tablets for the kids six and younger. Then schools would offer a once-a-week fluoride rinse for the kids through elementary school. And the pediatric dentists would apply a fluoride treatment after they cleaned the kids’ teeth. My three kids had almost no cavities right through college (one kid had one cavity her sophomore year). Their good teeth were not genetically endowed. :) My oldest had some striation on her teeth from too much fluoride at one point, but it went away.
We live in a complex chemical environment, often next to impossible to sort out. But from where I’m sitting, the fluoride seems to have been beneficial.
I will be surprised if Trump supports this federal power grab. He’s the one who left the pandemic public health management in the hands of the states and local governments, for which I will always be grateful. He also believes people should be able to pursue whatever treatment they want, even if that’s taking apricot pits to cure their cancer. He was strongly behind the Right to Try legislation.
Sodium Hypochlorite is probably the most used chemical. It’s a disinfectant that dissipates rapidly. Treatment plants have a parallel water pipe that runs alongside the finished water pipe going to distribution. This sends the water back to the plant for testing so we know what levels will be at the customer’s tap. Chlorine dissipates as it travels down a pipe, especially iron pipes. Some towns inject chlorine gas directly into the drinking water. I don’t like working with it because it’s so dangerous.
Sodium Hydroxide is added to control the Ph. Some towns use caustic soda. A powder is hard to work with.
Potassium Permanganate is used to take the iron out of suspension so it can be filtered. We have a lot of iron and manganese in our water in New England.
That’s mostly it. The big push now is PFAS treatment plants, like the picture I took today. (To remove contaminants) The plants are expensive but I like programming them because they’re easy.
I would say the best glass of drinking water needs to have whatever balance of minerals to your liking, pure water doesn’t taste good, also the chlorine needs to have dissipated. Oh, and ice cold.
EDIT: This is a good site for the top 10 chemicals.
Do you always need to increase the pH? I’d imagine occasionally you’d want an acid to take things the other way.
Agreed 100%. I’m assuming that they would start with what water supplies were fluoridated, then work from there, comparing IQ tests in those areas. I don’t have great faith in IQ tests and scores, but I assume the scores would be universally crappy.
I know that Bret and Heather mentioned that there are studies going back years raising suspicions about a correlation.
I have no idea whether my town fluoridated our water (I know my sister’s town did not). Like me, she did not give her infants fluoride supplements; like me, she breastfed exclusively for the first year. That’s seven kids, oldest is 36, youngest is 28. Not one cavity between them.
I worked in a factory that would plate copper. Down in the basement they had a whole system to dissolve copper oxide into the plating solution. Copper oxide is normally insoluble in water. Well, we could get around that with a little sulfuric acid and copper sulfate, but it was still tortuously slow. Powder, hopper, an auger to deliver measured amounts into the top of a cascade, then gradually increasing concentration until it got strong enough to pump up into the plating line. Every so often the whole thing needed to be drained out and the built up copper oxide lumps in the bottom chipped out.
I really don’t know much about the system; I let the other guys work on it, preferring to play with lasers and recalcitrant computers.
Yes, we always increase it. I did have to do the other way once. It was a huge land fill. The trash was lined with plastic and pipes were at the bottom sucking on the groundwater. That was very alkaline and I added a 50% sulfuric acid solution before it was piped off to the sewer treatment plant. It was scary working with that.
This is the kind of post that made Ricochet a great place to be!
I don’t have much trust in any of the Kennedys as a rule.
Given the poor character of many of their prominent members in the preceding generations, it is not surprising that a lack of character would be present in one of their offspring.
I worked in a water bottling plant at one time. 80% of our output was garden variety bottled water, 20% was premium (you’d know the brand) run through a reverse osmosis it comes out pure. Before it goes in the bottling room it gets minerals added.
During my orientation I asked why. I was told almost exactly like above. Pure water does not have the same taste and mouth feel people expect.
Also, I’ve read in various places that actually-pure water will leach minerals from your body, thus depleting them.
Or at least, those minerals are excreted in urine and not replaced by pure water, so they end up depleting.
That’s why I only drink rain water, or pure grain alcohol.
A couple of years ago I tried out a new water filter called ‘ZeroWater.’ It filters out nearly 100% of all particulate matter in tap water. But the resultant taste is extraordinarily bland, even bad. It filters out the minerals along with the garbage. The best water I have ever tasted came from UpState New York somewhere. My wife told me in that area many of the public water systems have a healthy dose of minerals in the water, making it taste so good.
So I went on an Internet search and found that you can add minerals to your water by buying something called ‘trace mineral drops.’ It is advertised as being healthy and all that rubbish, but I just wanted it for the taste. I bought some and added it to my tap water filtered through ZeroWater and it is the best tasting tap water I’ve ever had. I tried two different brands of trace mineral drops and found that one tasted great and the other had no taste at all!
Well, you can all talk about it all you want, but I know that my water, though it is well water, has some kind of fluoridation in it.
I first noticed it’s pernicious effects during a routine act of lovemaking, when it became apparent that something was interfering with my precious bodily fluids.
Now I’m only 68 years old, so I’m sure that fluoridation or something like it has been inflicted on us to sap our …… oh forget it.
Uh, huh. And of course, I’ll bet you experimented with fluoride vs non-fluoride water (as a control). And of course you need to replicate your tests in order to allow for the usual variation. So how many reps a day did you do?
LOL my hygienist said to rinse with mouthwash after I brush . . .
I think The Scarecrow was cracking wise…
Shhh.
Fluoride improves oral health, that’s why it’s in the water – it’s no poison. Analogous to iodized salt, a hold over from and earlier time. If you look at the ingredients on your tooth paste you should see something fluoride related.
Decades ago when nutritional deprivation was a bigger public health issue it was discovered that iodine could help. So it was put into salt which everyone ate. Similarly by accident decades ago, it was discovered that fluoride guards against cavities.
The story as I recall: Scientists stumbled across a town with usually good oral health. The water had naturally unusual high levels of fluoride. The link was made and studied. Thus to improve public health fluoride was introduced years ago to help people avoid dental problems.
I guess one could argue that both iodine in salt and fluoride in water are no longer necessary because of modern nutrition and toothpaste. However, it’s quite another to lie about why they were introduced in the first place. Kennedy is pretty out there on a number of things.
Fluoride mouthwash?
Iodine in salt is meant to be consumed and absorbed in the gut to provide a valuable mineral to the body. Fluoride does not work by ingestion and absorption in the gut. Fluoride works by chemically bonding with the enamel of the teeth. When drinking, water is not washed over the teeth thoroughly or for a long time. Brushing with fluoridated toothpaste is much more effective, because the teeth are covered with fluorine rich foam throughout the process. People spit out the toothpaste with minimal ingesting. If people brush with fluoride toothpaste, what is the added benefit of a gut full of fluoride water?
Mouthwash is usually antibacterial. Bacteria is bad for oral health as it causes tooth decay and gum disease.
Sure, if you’re the hoity-toity types who can afford real ice cream.
Look, we can all choose to swallow, when needed!
Well played.